


"Take it from a woman who's been married four times..."

by SapphicScholar



Series: Supercat Week 2019 [4]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Eventual fluff and smut, F/F, Slow Burn, eventual supercat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 10:14:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20928542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphicScholar/pseuds/SapphicScholar
Summary: A character study of Cat Grant as told through the four marriages that didn't last and the one that became her forever. Also known as my attempt to think through what sorts of life/work/relationship experiences made Cat into the woman we met at the start of season 1 (and how Kara Danvers went and flipped that all upside down)





	"Take it from a woman who's been married four times..."

**Author's Note:**

> Even though this fic is more focused on Cat as a person than just Cat as a partner, if you're someone who can't stand seeing one part of your OTP with someone else (although it's in the past and, in a lot of instances, not particularly happy), this may not be the fic for you. I totally get it and respect that! Also, I'll leave some content warnings on the individual chapters that might be a little spoiler-y, but they're there for ya if you need them.
> 
> For this first chapter, heads up on some medical scenes and pregnancy (not graphic or too detailed, but they're there) plus a bit of alcohol abuse

When Cat meets him, she’s 20 and more easily impressed than any of her future employees would ever believe possible. She’s lounging on the quad with Olivia (and the _boyfriend_—she figures if she says it enough, it’ll get easier to stomach with time), some dense, dry textbook on American legal history propped open on her knees. Somehow, she likes to imagine that if she drags it everywhere, maybe she’ll absorb the information by osmosis. It’s certainly keeping her arms toned, if nothing else. All it’s really done is convince her that she doesn’t want to be a lawyer, no matter how many people try to convince her that she’d make a great one. She already knows she would; she’s fairly certain that she could excel at anything she puts her mind to, no matter what that nagging voice that sounds suspiciously like her mother sometimes whispers late at night when she’s too wired to sleep but not focused enough to do work. On more than one occasion, that voice has driven her to the 24-hour co-ed gym over on Harvard’s campus, where she learned that a rather eclectic mix of people populate the facilities at 1 and 2 in the morning. A few doctors and surgeons from the university’s hospital. Some pre-med kids with books held up to their noses while their feet fly around on stationary bikes with the resistance too low for it to even count as a workout. A handful of jocks she’s fairly certain leave the weight station only for meals. The freshmen employees who don’t yet have the seniority to beg off the terrible overnight shifts. And her.

Okay, so maybe it isn’t just the heavy textbook that’s giving her such defined arms…and legs and abs. But the definition was getting her compliments. Or it used to. Until suddenly Olivia had a boyfriend and what they were doing “needs to stop, Cat.” Cat had wanted to ask what boring old Billy (she can hear Olivia’s voice now: “Cat, you know his name is William”) Anderson could do that she couldn’t. Maybe they weren’t in a relationship of any kind of public nature, but that made sense! Neither of them were ready to throw on baggy clothes and those clunky Doc Martens and label themselves just because half of the women at Radcliffe already did. But they were happy. They made each other laugh. They had phenomenal sex. And couldn’t that be enough?

Apparently not, Cat thinks, peering over her sunglasses at Olivia and Billy and their annoyingly, childishly public display of affection with their linked fingers and soft kisses pressed to hands and shoulders and cheeks. She scoots further away, claiming a spot more firmly in the shade. If she’s going to be forced to deal with them, she may as well get her reading done without prematurely aging her skin in the process.

A few minutes later, a voice interrupts her attempts at immersing herself in the world of early-twentieth-century Supreme Court precedents or something. “Bit dry, isn’t it?”

Cat blinks up at him. He’s cute. Tall, with tan skin and floppy brown hair falling into his eyes just enough to be intentional, not so much that it would block his vision. “About as interesting as the professor.”

The boy laughs at that. Loudly. Far more loudly than such a comment deserves. She narrows her eyes at him.

“Sorry.” He wavers slightly in the face of her glare. “You’ve got Blane, right?”

“Yes…” Cat wonders if he’s been stalking her.

“He teaches a grad version of the class over at the law school. And let me tell you, he doesn’t get any more interesting when the class sections are longer.”

Harvard Law School. Maybe he could be upgraded from cute to handsome. And the fact that Olivia’s attention is now on her and not Billy…well, that’s just a bonus. “Any hints for surviving?”

“Perhaps a dashing tutor who has a stack of notecards that would get you an A on the final?”

Cat leans forward, cocking her head as she looks up at him, taking in the hands fidgeting behind his back, giving away the hint of nerves that flatter her ego. “And what would this dashing tutor want in return?”

“Like most law students, I will happily be paid in the form of caffeine.”

“A cup of coffee for an A? I’d have to be a terrible businesswoman to say no to that offer.”

A broad smile splits his face, and Cat reverts back to “cute” in her head. But still. Cute is cute. And a future lawyer is a future lawyer.

“Cat Grant, by the way.”

“Right!” A light pink blush tints his cheeks. “I’m Mitchell Foster. Er, well, I go by Mitch.”

“Well, Mitch-not-Mitchell, why don’t you sit down?”

She can see Olivia’s slight frown out of the corner of her eye as they figure out when to meet. She can’t feel guilty about it, though; she’s not the one who went out and got a damn Billy.

\---

After a few months together, Cat finds that she really does like Mitch. He’s funny and cute. He knows the best restaurants in town and loves taking her out on his arm. He even manages to get them reservations at the only restaurant with a Michelin star in the area to celebrate her 21st birthday and buy Cat her first legal drink since Dukakis went and changed the law just a few years too early for her taste. Plus, Mitch is tall—_so_ tall—and she loves it, loves being tucked into his side when it’s cool at night, loves the way people look jealous of them, loves the aesthetics of the contrast in photographs. And he cares for her without worrying about what it means. He isn’t like the boyfriend she had back in high school who freaked out when she mentioned still being together at prom, which was only a few months away; instead, Mitch talks about futures that extend into years. And maybe she’s not quite sold on _years_ together yet, but it might not be the worst thing.

\---

Cat meets Mitch’s extended family at his graduation party and can’t quite fight back the creeping sensation that they’re all seeing her as something that she isn’t sure she’s ready to be. But Mitch is happy—he’s graduating with good grades and a good job that Cat finds out later that evening is at his father’s law firm (“Didn’t even need the old man’s help, though, not with grades like those!” Robert had declared in a toast that made Cat think maybe he did). So Cat doesn’t spoil the evening by pointing out that she isn’t quite ready to become the pretty wife on his arm at law firm functions; in fact, she thinks she’d rather have him as a pretty date on her arm when she’s getting her Pulitzer. No one wants to hear that, though, so she smiles and sips daintily at her glass of white wine instead of the bourbon she’d prefer.

\---

Cat graduates a full semester early. Her mother sends her a card with her regrets—“Kitty, you must know I’d set aside dates in May, not December. Perhaps if you’d given me any sort of advance notice I could have arranged something, but I simply cannot cancel on Rita—not when we have her Pulitzer to celebrate. If you had any sort of appreciation for poetry, I know you’d understand.” Cat shrugs off Mitch’s concern and gets drunk with Olivia like old times. The next morning, Mitch brings her coffee and helps her pack up her dorm room, driving all of her things over to his place, which she insists is temporary. Just until she gets her first paycheck from _The Daily Planet_. She doesn’t tell anyone that her job is to be Perry White’s assistant. If things go according to her plan, she’ll have bylines by the end of the year.

On New Year’s Eve as the world gets ready to ring in the start of 1989, though, Mitch asks to make things permanent. Really permanent. Drop down on one knee and offer a future wrapped up in words like “forever” kind of permanent. It’s romantic, and the ring is gorgeous, and Mitch is looking at her with those big brown eyes, and she can’t really think of a good reason to say no, so she doesn’t.

It takes her three whole weeks and several pointed questions from Mitch to tell her mother. Cat can hear the judgment in her hum and the airy, “Isn’t that nice?” She doesn’t tell anyone at the office—she doesn’t need Perry assuming she’ll go and get herself knocked up within the year and using that as a reason to keep her away from reporting positions.

Their engagement is short—his mother thought a spring wedding would be “just lovely”—and her coworkers don’t find out until she returns from her honeymoon with a ring that she decides she should actually keep on in the office. By that time, though, she’s already moved over to gossip, which isn’t exactly prime real estate, but dammit, it’s a step up from being Perry’s assistant.

After another few months, she’s managed to wrangle a substantial number of bylines in other sections of the paper, so that damn upstart Lois Lane can take her fancy investigate reporting and shove it. Because Cat has gotten there without any help from Perry or the reporters who relegated her to the role of “that blonde in gossip.” First it had been a rumor that led her to a big enough story to make it into the Sunday Style section, which had gotten her a few follow-up pieces, which had given her the time needed to become friends with a few of the gay men who split their time between the front lines of fashion and the front lines of activism, which finally landed her a story in the Politics section and a little bit of respect, even if it came with some ugly hate mail and sidelong glances from a few of her less progressive colleagues. Not that they liked her even before the favorable coverage of ACT-UP protests.

Mitch is supportive enough. He still remembers his first year at the law firm, and even though now that he’s a second-year associate he tries to come home earlier, he doesn’t make a big fuss on the nights Cat misses dinner. At least, not at first.

Once she seems more settled with regular reporting, the comments start.

“Weren’t you planning to make dinner tonight?”

“I thought you said this week was better.”

“You know, it might be nice to see you every now and then.”

Still, she knows it could be worse. So she makes an effort. Passes up drinks with her coworkers here and there. Opts not to pursue a story that seems like it won’t matter enough to garner follow up articles. Makes Mitch’s favorite meals on the days she gets home early, even the ones that she can barely stomach. It’s probably for the best, though. The stress of the job is getting to her, leaving its mark in the form of purple bags that mar the skin below her eyes and a slight layer of fat that she pinches disdainfully when she dresses in the mornings, thinking wistfully about the days in college when she had time to do things like go to a gym without worrying about whether her husband would notice that she’s gone in the middle of the night.

All day at work, though, she’s no one’s wife. She’s Cat Grant. Up and coming reporter. She might not have snagged the first story about that damn flying alien in his colorful spandex monstrosity, but she’s found an in with the Mayor’s office during campaign season, and she has drinks with an executive assistant from the Governor’s office lined up, and she’s heard rumors that one of the full-time political correspondents is getting ready to retire in the next year. If all goes according to plan, her name will be the first one in Perry’s mind when that job opens up.

She keeps repeating that to herself like a mantra, even when Susan from the Governor’s office is duller than her old legal history textbook. Even when Jeremy, the mayor’s campaign manager, gropes her in a taxi on their way from a campaign rally to a stump speech across town. Even when Perry taps some no-name boy fresh out of college to cover the mayoral election instead of her. None of that will matter once she’s got the job she deserves.

She can almost taste that promotion as she chases story after story, the bags under her eyes morphing from something she hates to a point of pride. It feels like her moment has come when Perry nods at her to go chase down the story in response to a police report about a shooting at a campaign event. She’s out of her chair and at the door before half the office has even registered the news. Once she gets there, she fights through the crowds in front of City Hall, yelling out, “Press! Press!” She finally manages to get herself in front of the chief of police for the briefing, even if half of it comes down to: “We’re not yet at liberty to say,” and, “We can’t be sure at this time.”

After standing out in the hot sun and ducking around caution tape and interviewing as many bystanders as she can before the police stop her, she steps to the side to page through her notes, deciding she needs something more to make her story stand out. It’s then that she spots Jeremy walking back towards City Hall from the street and, against her gut reaction to avoid the son of a bitch for the rest of her life, yells out to him.

“Cat?” He looks closely at her, and Cat feels her stomach lurch and her skin crawl. “Cat, is that you?”

She doesn’t bother answering such an obvious question, just walks towards him and nods. “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

Tilting his head to the side, he steps away from the crowds, and Cat follows him, mentally rehearsing all those self-defense moves she learned in that safety class Olivia dragged her to freshman year. When he reaches a hand out in her direction, she flinches, but he turns out to be aiming for the caution tape in front of her. When he lifts it, motioning for her to follow him behind it to areas where the rest of the press are being kept away, she knows then that she’s made the right decision for the story at the very least.

As they walk around the perimeter, starting at the back of the building where it’s much quieter, he feeds her the full story, and within minutes she knows why he’s feeding it to her without a fight; if she prints even half of the details she’s getting, it’ll make the mayor look incredibly sympathetic at a moment when his poll numbers are dropping after a dismal debate performance and his advocacy of some less-than-popular stances on school taxes and low-income housing in the area. Plus, making the opponent’s supporters out to be homicidal criminals never hurts. Still, Cat wants the byline and the story with the insider scoop no one else has, so she scribbles down every word, her pen flying across the paper. She barely pauses, even as she feels sweat dripping down the back of her neck, which she can only assume must be burning under the high midday sun. As he keeps talking, her fingers cramp like they haven’t since her freshmen lecture hall days back before she knew she didn’t need to copy every word the professors uttered, and her feet ache in the stylish yet less than practical heels she’d put on that morning. She’s snapped out of her thoughts about her own discomfort by a long pause in what had been, until then, nonstop chatter.

“This—this is where it happened.” The way Jeremy lowers his voice to a reverent whisper sounds performative, and Cat has half a mind to tell him to lay off the theatrics. But then she looks up and spots the blood spatter staining the side of the building and the stairs, drying to an almost purplish black across the pale stone. And even though she knows the mayor and his bodyguard both survived, knows that it had been messy but not fatal, she can’t stop her stomach from roiling. She’s fairly certain if she’d eaten a single meal that day, it would have come back up. Jeremy’s voice, now feeding her the details she’d already gotten from the initial police report, sounds like it’s being filtered from somewhere deep underwater, the words garbled, echoing but indistinct. She blinks up at him, seeing less and less of the world around her as blackness washes over her.

She wakes up in the back of an ambulance, almost immediately trying to sit up and insist that she’s fine, dehydrated and hungry, maybe, but fine. The EMTs don’t buy it and insist on taking her to the emergency room. She grumbles, but when it becomes clear that they won’t budge on the issue, she resigns herself to writing her story out by hand, then typing it up at the office when they finally release her. The two EMTs exchange incredulous glances when she holds out an imperious arm with a blood pressure cuff wrapped around it and demands her bag.

“Miss.” The EMT closest to her clears his throat. “We, uh, need to assess you before you can start doing your work.”

“Fine,” she huffs, resolving to get her damn bag the first moment she can.

As it turns out, that first moment is further away than she’d like.

One ambulance ride, one consultation with a nurse and a doctor, and a vial or two of drawn blood later, Cat finally finds herself alone in a room, an IV for fluids in her left arm but her right hand free to draft her story. She’s on the fourth paragraph before the doctor comes in to remove the IV and release her.

“About time,” she mutters, closing her eyes as the needle comes out. She hopes the bleeding stops soon so she can take off the bandaid. It wouldn’t do to come back to the office looking like she’d gone and fainted at the first sight of violence.

“Well, Mrs. Foster, we just want to make sure you’re stable before we let you go.”

Cat winces at the moniker. Technically she’d changed her name, but she’d never gotten used to hearing it, doesn’t use it at work, barely tolerates it even when Mitch is with her and they become Mr. and Mrs. Foster, as if they’re no longer individuals. Or maybe he is, but she’s become some accessory. “I’m fine. I’ll eat a big dinner tonight and drink plenty of fluids, okay?”

“Alright.” He holds eye contact with her and clasps his hands together. “I’d like to remind you that it’s important to take good care of yourself at this stage.”

Her eyes narrow at the tone. “I’m not about to drop dead you know.”

“Of course not!” He holds up his hands in a placating gesture that doesn’t help Cat’s mood in the slightest. “It’s just that the second trimester is a time of important development for your baby.”

“Excuse me.”

“You—you’re…” He looks down at the chart in front of him. “You’re nearly 4 months pregnant, Mrs. Foster.”

“You must be mistaken.”

He’s staring at that chart like it holds every fucking answer in the world. “We, uh, typically at this stage we assume…well, er, right. Your bloodwork…it’s a routine test, of course.”

Cat wonders if maybe she’s still on the ground in front of City Hall. Perhaps she smacked her head on the concrete. If she’s unconscious, all of this makes more sense. Sure, she’s put on a couple of pounds, but there’s none of the telltale swelling. None of the morning sickness she’s heard horror stories about. No weird cravings or sentimental feelings making her tear up at the sight of babies and puppies. And fine, okay, maybe she’d missed a few periods, but that always happened when she was stressed. It didn’t have to _mean_ anything.

“Mrs. Foster, are you alright?”

“Just fine.” She stands quickly, blinking away the stars that suddenly cloud her field of vision and snatching her bag off the chair by the doorway. “I can see myself out.”

The doctor’s parting words about prenatal vitamins and doctors echo in her head the whole way out of the maze of hospital corridors and back to the office. Only the clacking of keys as she bangs out her story manages to hold them in abeyance, but once she’s turned in her draft and then her revised version, she’s told to go home, where she’s left with nothing but the doctor’s words ringing in her ears.

_Pregnant. Prenatal vitamins. OB/GYN._

She thinks of the women from the office who have gotten pregnant. Thinks of how their stories were suddenly given away in anticipation, as if they were dying instead of bringing life into the world. And oh god, there’s a tiny person that will come out of her. A tiny person who most definitely had not been part of the plan. Certainly not a plan when she’s barely more than a child herself—only 22, and okay, fine, she’ll be 23 by the time the kid is born, but still, she has a whole life in front of her. And maybe that tiny person doesn’t need to be part of the plan, but she hears Mitch’s voice in her head talking about the family he’s always dreamed of and knows she should tell him, even if it’s her body on the line.

By the time he gets home, she’s drawn up several pro-con lists and considered all the ways things could play out. The doctor could have been wrong. Unlikely, but still a possibility. She’s already left a voicemail for her own doctor requesting an appointment without giving a reason. Answers are always good. And if she is pregnant, well, they have a choice to make. They could wait until the timing is better, but a little voice in the back of her head insists that the timing will _never_ be good. She loves her job, loves working and having a life that doesn’t involve being hyperaware of her family at all times. But she suspects work is only going to get busier before it gets better, and that better might not come for years and years and years. And maybe…well, she didn’t exactly plan on a baby—hell, there was a reason they used protection 99% of the time—but she doesn’t hate the idea of nurturing some kid—watching their first steps and first words, showing them all the unconditional love she never got, helping guide them into the world… It would be rewarding. She tamps down on the nagging questions about whether she really wants that forever to happen with Mitch. He’s sweet and kind and talks about family like it’s his number one priority. Which makes his response—the wide-eyed excitement, the sweeping pronouncements about calling the parents and telling their friends and going out to get her all the pickles or ice cream or cheese or whatever it is she needs right this very second—all the more expected. But somehow she doesn’t expect how contagious his enthusiasm will be. Sure, she isn’t totally swept up in only the good possibilities—her brain is too aware of what motherhood can do to a woman’s career to let her forget the downsides—but saying the words, “I’m pregnant,” aloud to Mitch a second time doesn’t give her the same panicky reaction as it did the first time.

Still, she doesn’t tell anyone, not even after her doctor confirms that she’s pregnant and gets her set up on a regimen of prenatal vitamins and a slightly higher calorie diet (“No skipping meals, Cat. You’re eating for two now!”) and Lamaze classes with some hippie instructor that makes her want to gouge her eyes out. She doesn’t tell her mother, despite the fact that Mitch’s entire extended family already knows. She doesn’t tell Olivia, who’s single again and working her way up the ladder in DC and might have Cat admitting to things she shouldn’t say out loud—not now that she’s made her decision.

At work she most definitely does not tell Perry, who’s finally letting her spend more and more time on the politics beat. Doesn’t tell Lois, who she knows would want to throw her a baby shower just to out her to the whole office. Doesn’t even tell that wide-eyed farm boy who makes her heart race in a way that brings her back to the early days with Olivia. Clark would probably insist on carrying everything for her and pulling out her chair and picking up her lunch—or, god, maybe even bringing her something from home. But the office doesn’t need to know. Not until she needs time off, and she’s still got several months before that’s an issue.

In the interim, she tries to mask the changes to her body under looser clothing, deciding she’s lucky for managing to get an early March due date, if only because she can cloak her weight in chunky sweaters and puffy jackets and the holiday pounds everyone else always seems to pack on.

The holidays bring Mitch’s family and far too many questions about how much time she’ll be taking off from work—they all chuckle when she says she’ll be going back as soon as the doctors clear her. Cat grimaces as his mother heaps extra food on her plate and his aunts _tsk_ at her for being too skinny. The only time she relaxes is at night when Mitch insists that she enjoy hot baths and foot rubs and her favorite candles. More often than they have in ages, they end their nights with sex that Cat suspects has a lot to do with pregnancy hormones, but Mitch seems to think is her way of rebuilding the intimacy lost to long hours in anticipation of building their little family together.

About a month out from her due date, when her pregnancy seems to be as much of an open secret in the office as Cole’s homosexuality (proper southern belle wife be damned), Cat finally sits down with Perry and informs him in no uncertain terms that while she is pregnant, she does not intend to give up her career just because she’s having a baby and that she does expect to be treated the same as she always has been. He congratulates her and tells her that she’ll still have a job but, “you’ll see—you’ll want more time with that little baby.”

\---

Somehow, despite Cat’s extensive preparations—her lists of dates and appointments and tasks and things to buy and assemble and baby-proof —she manages to stave off thinking about the reality of pushing a human out of her body until a couple of weeks before it’s due to happen. At that point, a series of increasingly vivid nightmares about the experience force it to the forefront of her thoughts. For the first time in many years, she finds herself actively wishing she had a mother who loved her unconditionally, the kind who would come over and hold her hand and promise her that everything would be fine. Instead, she has Katherine. Katherine, who finally knows she’s due to have a grandchild, but took finding out as an opportunity to imply that Cat would likely fail her future son as a mother. So she’s out.

In lieu of a mother’s comforting reassurances, Cat finds herself reading about the minutia of giving birth, including everything that could possibly go wrong at every step of the process. Unsurprisingly, it does not help. The nightmares get worse and worse until, on March 2, 1990, exactly six days before the due date, Cat goes into labor.

Even after a bitter, acrimonious divorce and custody battle, Cat will, begrudgingly and only years later, admit that she is grateful for how easy Mitch made that day. Within minutes of her yell, her bags are loaded into the car, and not once during the entire drive to the hospital does he let his own nerves show. He checks them in and calls Cat’s doctors and gets them down to a room with time to spare in the half hour Cat had allotted for that part of the process in her schedule. Once labor starts in earnest, he doesn’t flinch when Cat’s nails break the skin on the back of his hand. He listens to her scream and curse at him and his stupid fucking sperm and stays quiet, fills the rare silent moments with sincere thanks to her for everything she’s doing to bring their child into the world. When the pain gets so bad that Cat throws up, he holds her hair back and then dabs a cool washcloth along her forehead and cheeks once she’s able to catch her breath. And when a red-faced baby boy wails his way into the world, he cuts the umbilical cord and calls their families—even Katherine—to tell them the good news.

Once they have a chance to be alone in their room with their baby—Adam, a name Cat picked from the baby books as a favorite early on—he sits at her side and coos at the swaddled bundle and babbles to him about his perfect little face and his wonderful mother and a family that can’t wait to see him grow up. Cat blinks back tears, already feeling like she doesn’t deserve a word of it.

The first few weeks pass by in a haze of visitors and sleep deprivation. Cat’s eyes feel like sandpaper, and her muscles seem to scream and protest every time she moves, and her breasts ache in a way she hadn’t expected. The baby barely sleeps, and when he does, Cat can always think of so many other things she should be doing instead of napping right along with him like the doctor had instructed her to do, and besides, every time she closes her eyes, she’s met with scenes of all the ways she can and will fail that tiny little human sleeping in his bassinet—fears she finally admits to Mitch after two full weeks of panic attacks and tears.

He holds her and tells her again and again that he believes in her.

Less than a year later, when they’re in the process of divorcing, he throws those words back at her.

No matter how easy he made the birth, no matter how much he loves their boy, she decides right then and there that she will never, ever forgive him.

He decides to take a job in Opal City the same day Cat informs him that she’s been offered a position in DC. He tells her, in no uncertain terms, that he will be getting full custody of Adam. He shows up to their next custody hearing with a veritable army of lawyers. He parades every one of Cat’s faults out in front of the judge with devastating precision. Every single fear she’s ever had about herself as a person is listed out in front of her as fact, as the definition of who she is at her core, from the person who should know her best.

After two more rounds of that torture, after countless hours of hearing all the ways she would fail her son confirmed for her, she signs away her custody rights, watches as Mitch leaves Metropolis with Adam in tow.

She accepts the job in DC and spends the two weeks she has before she needs to move drinking her way into oblivion. It doesn’t stop the self-loathing, and it doesn’t ease the pain, but it’s something else. It’s something that isn’t losing Adam. It’s a way she can hurt herself that doesn’t happen in a courtroom or a lawyer’s office. Each morning, waking up on the bathroom floor, it feels like she’s purged just a tiny little bit of the pain. Either that or she’s drowned it in something that’s making it harder to locate.

When she moves, she sells every bit of her furniture except the writing desk she inherited from her father after his death. She doesn’t think she deserves it, but she can’t give up the only other person she loves.

She leaves for DC in a rented truck with a desk and several boxes of books and clothes shoved into the back and vows that she will never look back.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Twitter and Tumblr @sapphicscholar
> 
> Also, if you have any thoughts about how you prefer your updates, let me know! Right now I have them divided up by character, but that makes the unedited chapter 2 very long (about 15-20k words). Obviously it'll be longer between updates if I go long, but you'll get the whole arc of each of the 5 in one go so pros and cons?


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